The Church has a right to be herself

The modern world in which we live is replete with references to rights.  We claim rights to free speech, to religion, to assembly, and more.  These seem to most, who live in liberal democracies, to be part of the basic expectations for decent human life and law.

The language of “rights” is largely a product of Western jurisprudence, with a pedigree which can be seen in everything from Basque fueros to the Edictum Theodorici, to the Corpus Juris Civilis of the Emperor Justinian.  The idea is generally the following: if you are beholden to live under a particular legal order, you are entitled to certain legal protections.  This has been done traditionally to protect the average person from predation from powerful and overweening civil authority.  The law, in this conception, is considered to be superior in authority to the executive power, to utilize a modern term for that authority which carries out the mandates of the law.  Thus, even in the Medieval kingdom of Aragon, it was said, en Aragón antes que rey, hubo ley, or, “In Aragon, before there was a king, there was a law.”  This conception perdures even today, at least in theory. Our presidents and prime ministers swear on some text or pact to which they refer their authority. Often times, this is a Sacred Text like the Bible.  In other countries, like in Modern Spain, the monarch swears to uphold the constitution.  No man, however great, possesses, or should possess, absolute power.  Ultimately, are all equal before God, his Law, and the laws which men establish for the common good.

The Church, likewise a societas, to borrow partially from Bellarmine, is essentially a Kingdom, governed by the Kingship of Our Lord Jesus Christ, an authority delegated in the visible Church, through her sacred ministers, who by virtue of ordination possess potestas sacra, a “Sacred Power” or mandate to teach, govern and sanctify the Church in persona Christi.  This conception is unalienable from the Deposit of Faith and how we understand the character of Sacred Ordination.

However, from the beginning, the Church has always known that those who govern her, although acting in persona Christi, are not therefore ipsissimus Christus (Christ himself).  They are human beings with their own virtues and vices.  Even those who govern in the name of Christ do not possess absolute authority. Yet many voices have weighed in the Church’s history with differing views as to how this is so.  Whether it is Pope Gelasius’ theory of the Two Swords, or the Dictatus Papae of Gregory VII, the Church has for some time oscillated between what I would call Papal maximalism, and Ecclesial maximalism.  That is to say, there have been considerable disagreements on where the Church authority ends and the authority of the state begins.  Moreover, the Church on earth has not yet completely settled where the Pope’s authority as head end, and where the rights of the Church as the body begin.

Hubert Jedin once wrote in his landmark History of the Council of Trent that the main beneficiary of the debates between the Pope and the Councils, which came to a head at the Council of Constance, was neither the Pope nor the Councils, but the Nation-State.  That is to say, a Church which is unable to govern herself in a satisfactory way, in accordance with revealed and natural law,  will inevitably find herself at the mercy of forces either inimical to her, or ambivalent to her.  Ultimately, a Church unable to govern herself will become impoverished, as light under a bushel, and salt without its savor.

Today, we have a completely unique problem.  The Church in former times could generally rely upon the respublica Christiana, or Christendom writ large, to address disorders of internal governance.  It was not uncommon to find even pious Christian leaders, like Isabel of Castile, openly resisting nepotistic eccelesial appointments in her realms. Famously, Charles VII of France in his Pragmatic Sanction severely curtailed the rights of the Papacy in his kingdom. In the 20th century this kind of power arguably occurred most famously in the Papal Conclave Veto of 1903, in which Emperor Franz Joseph exercised his jus exclusivae and banned Cardinal Mariano Rampolla from assuming the Papal Throne, and so paved the way of for the election of Giuseppe Sarto, or Pius X.  The annals of the interaction between the Church and the State throughout history show a complicated tension between the two.  Yet to borrow lightly from the aphorism of Pope Benedict XVI regarding science and religion, the Church tends to purify the state from considering itself as an end in itself, detached from God’s law and the dictates of conscience.  The State, on the other hand, traditionally has purified the Church from her inner hypocrisy.  In this, the state once again becomes to the Church a sort of Biblical Babylon or Assyria; if the Church cannot bear the burden of freedom and joy of obedience to God, into captivity she must go.

Historically, we find ourselves in an unprecedented situation.  The Universal Church lives in the midst of states which are either neutral or hostile to her presence.  There are no longer any external voices that would urge the Church toward internal reform.  To the contrary, the secular world yearns to have the Church silenced in her authority to convict the hearts of men, and so welcomes the dimming of her light before the nations.  Gone are the times when even a Council would require a royal exequatur for its decrees to be established, because Christian princes considered as sacred the moral and spiritual good of their subjects.  Now, the restraining influence of religiously and morally informed powers, at least in principle, is eliminated.  Catholics around the world once prayed for the liberty and exaltation of Holy Mother Church after every Holy Mass.  Yet, while the institutional Church has largely grown in liberty in her self governance, she has now been humiliated by her corruption.  The Church, and especially the Papacy’s moral leadership, which started with the papacy of Leo XIII, has now come to an end.  Christians for centuries have long yearned for a Pastor Angelicus to come from the Throne of Peter.  The Popes of the past century have largely been men of outstanding moral, intellectual, and pastoral quality.  We have relied upon their rectitude.  All Catholics have been subconsciously ultramontane.  No longer.

Canon Law acknowledges a basic reality of human psychology.  If for instance the Pastor of a local parish no longer commands the respect and obedience of his flock due to his own fault, he has essentially lost his moral authority.  In such cases, such a Pastor may have to be removed because of odium populi/plebis, or the “hatred of the people”.  The Pastor’s presence in such a case is considered so abhorrent and burdensome to the people, that he is unable to practically exercise his ministry.  This is enshrined in the Code of Canon Law ¶ 1171.  The Pastor of the parish may removed for these reasons, but what about the Ordinary of the Pastor?  He is not canonically liable to the same scrutiny, but practically speaking, he most certainly is.  One need only call to mind the recent example of the priests of the Nigerian diocese of Ahiara, who even after the Pope threatened them, basically carried out a “bottom-top” interdict, and refused to administer the Sacraments unless in danger of death or violation of divine precept.  Eventually, even Pope Francis was brought to heel.  The same has even happened on these shores, with the massive popular rejection, by Priests and lay faithful, of the former Bishop of Scranton, Bishop Martino.

Although the concept of odium populi is on the books in Canon Law, why does it only apply to local Pastors, and not to the Pastor of Pastors, that is to say the Local Ordinary, or the Supreme Pastor on Earth, the Bishop of Rome?  Here is where basic human psychology meets the letter of the law.  This is where, as I said before in my essay on the Emergent Clerical #MeToo Movement, we need to have a serious discussion regarding what I call “Ecclesiastical Subsidiarity”.  That is, that the most fundamental and dynamic level of the Church is in her local parishes and people.  The true centers of dynamism are not in her hierarchy or in her chanceries.  There must be some sort of accountability of Bishops to their clergy and people.  This is a reality in fact in many places where they have the courage to act.  We must go further: this must be enshrined in the Law.  As I said earlier, we should be able to say as a Church, like in the Middle Ages, en iglesia antes que rey, hubo ley, that before there was a Pope, there was the Law: the law of Christ, the law of the Gospel, the law proceeding from the Divine Omnipotence and Eternal Wisdom.  Granted, odium populi must be grounded and substantiated in something beyond mere emotion, but rather in a critical mass of people who have observed that the Pope or Bishops has habitually acted against the precepts of Christ.  One of the primary attributes of the spirit of Antichrist and the spirit of iniquity is its fundamental lawlessness; the belief that whatever laws apply to others, do not apply to themselves.  In this vein, Father Thomas Rosica infamously said that Pope could “break Catholic tradition whenever he wants.”  Such an understanding is odious both to Catholic faith and morals, and directly in contradiction to the Catechism of the Catholic Church, ¶ 86, and the Vatican II Dogmatic Constitution Dei Verbum.

This shift from lawfulness to observance will not occur on its own.  This will only emerge when Priests and lay faithful, arm and arm, refuse to capitulate to the unjust and illegal demands of a Bishop or a Pontiff.  In the late Middle Ages, Popes were frequently only elected when it was understood beforehand that he would govern in accordance with the Canons and the support of the College of Cardinals, as Father Peter Stravinskas lately noted in a published homily in Holy Innocents in Manhattan.  Although Popes frequently claimed supreme authority in respect to secular potentates, they had more trouble claiming supreme authority in regard to the Church.  Even the decrees of infallibility of Vatican I, as has been noted from Newman to today, are strictly circumscribed, and with good reason.  Although Canon Law acknowledges the Pope as Supreme Legislator of the Universal Church, perhaps it is time for the Church of God to assert an even more essential role: that the Pope, like us all, is beneath the law of God and his commandments, which form the basis of how we all behave as Christians. It is absurd for the papacy to assert for itself in the canonical sphere what it or its partisans deny in the moral and theological sphere.

Blessed John Henry Cardinal  Newman once converted upon his conviction of the sentence of St. Augustine, Securus judicat orbis terrarum, or that the universal Church rests secure in her judgment of the world.  Cardinal Newman, himself a scholar of the Arian Controversy, knew that it was not just the verdict of Popes or Bishops that determined the course of the future; it was the faith and goodness of “average” Catholics that set the Church on a firm course in an age of infidelity.  Perhaps it was a signal of divine inspiration that the dogma of the infallibility of the Pope was proclaimed in the midst of a severe thunderstorm.  That is, it is only in the context of the larger firmament of God’s justice and mercy that any governance in the Church can be established.  We are but lesser stars in such a constellation, but yet we profess that with the grace of God, we too may shine brilliantly “blameless and innocent, children of God without blemish in the midst of a crooked and perverse generation” (Philippians 2:15).